Think Structurally, Act Individually?: The Limits of Racial Sympathy

• In Event: Racial Attitudes from Policy to Protest

Abstract

Racial sympathy, defined as White distress over Black suffering, is an influential, but understudied, force in American politics. In other work, I explore the relationship between racial sympathy and public opinion using surveys and experiments. In this paper, I take a different approach by conducting a series of in-depth interviews with racial justice activists; these White Americans are unusually, deeply, and genuinely invested in eradicating Black suffering. They also have financial and educational resources that afford them a sense of efficacy and facilitate their activism. Almost all the activists I interviewed recognize the systemic and institutionalized dimensions of racial injustice. However, curiously, many activists propose individual-level solutions, such as tolerance classes, eliminating prejudice at home, and empathizing with individual Black people, to rectify inequality. When explicitly prompted, these activists do support public policies such as affirmative action and reparations; however, they do not identify these efforts as priorities. I complement the qualitative interviews with results from a national study that surveys White Americans on their proposed solutions to racial inequality. Ultimately I argue that, to channel White racial sympathy into more meaningful political change, political and media elites may need to explicitly articulate the connection between systemic injustice and institutional response. Without these cues, some racially sympathetic White Americans will continue to focus their efforts on changing individual hearts and minds rather than the enduring systems that perpetuate Black suffering.

Author

• Jennifer Chudy, Wellesley College